Today I'm going to talk to you about something a little bit left field.
I want to talk about beanbags.
Well, I actually want to talk to you about what I learned from filling my first ever bean bag and how it correlates to building a business online.
I've recently moved and one of the things that I purchased was some amazing beanbags for my outdoor decorating.
The thing is, I haven't filled a beanbag before. So, I was like, “How hard can this be? I'm a dentist, I’m a hypnotherapist, I'm a psychotherapist, I'm an award-winning author. Surely, I can fill a beanbag, right?”
Well, I'm going to tell you that my apartment looked like it had snowed here in Perth before I had finished filling my first beanbag. And as I was filling it, as I was working on it, I had this voiceover going on my head. And it was feeding me with the similarities between what I was doing at that moment, and what I had learned about building a business were.
So, I want to share five similarities between building a business online and filling up a beanbag with you.
1. It's easier with more than one person.
When we're building a business online, we feel like we have to do everything. We often become micro-managers, we become control freaks, and we won't release that because we have this belief that we are the only ones who can deal with that.
Or, we can do it better.
I was like that when I first started working with my VA. I wanted to have total control over everything, the look of everything, and the feel of everything. And I had to really slowly learn to let go and to trust her so that she could actually move into that space and she could learn to grow, and want to improve on what she was doing.
Which she does now. She does an amazing job. And if I hadn't have been able to relinquish that control, to let her in, then that wouldn't have happened.
But it's like a beanbag, right?
When you're filling a beanbag up, more than one person is going to make life a lot easier. And in fact, I worked out probably the exact number of people you need to make filling a beanbag really easy is 4.
One person to hold the zip area open…
One person to be pointing the beans into it that gap…
Another person to be supporting the end of the bag that's got the beans (especially if you did what I did and got the big ones because they're cheaper that way)…
And then you want a person that's just standing nearby with a vacuum ready to suck up those loose beads before they go everywhere, because what I found about that is that they defy gravity, don't they?
They're like they flowing up and out of stuff. And for every bean that you suck up at the end is at least three more under furniture.
You want someone right there, right then to catch it.
That's like our business.
We want people who are specializing in a certain field to be there taking it from us, rather than learning how to do everything ourselves. With this, you’ll start making money.
And in fact, for a long time, I wasn't even making money in my business, and I was paying a VA. So I was using money I was earning as a dentist to pay my VA, because I knew that without her, without her doing what she was doing with my social media profiles, without her creating all my stuff, without her doing everything she was doing, I was never going to get to the point where it's going to make money at all.
So for me, it was an investment in hiring her to take on tasks that I didn't want to do, but that were necessary.
And this is the same thing when you get to the point where you need to be doing Facebook ads. Should you be going off and spending thousands of dollars and hours of your time learning how to do them yourself? Or should you be paying an expert to do it?
If you're not good at creating funnels, do you go off and learn how to do a funnel yourself and create mediocre ones? Or do you pay an expert to create one amazing funnel for you that is going to be bringing business into you?
So have a think about where you are in your business and what you should be doing. But also what you are doing that you don't want to do. Because if you're doing stuff that you don't want to do, and it's draining you, you need to let that go and find someone that's going to take it off your hands.
Maybe initially, when you're doing this, you're going to be paying these people. And maybe you're not going to be making more money initially. But once you get the machine going, once it's all happening, they're going to be taking the burden off you and freeing you up to actually do the money-making activity within your business – to be doing the coaching, to be creating the products, all the stuff that is your field of specialty. While they're doing the social media, while they're running the ads, while they're creating the funnels.
Do you see how this works?
Okay, so that's the first thing I learned – that it's easier with more than one person. And in fact, you shouldn't be doing it alone.
2. No matter how much you prepare when you're first starting out, you're going to stuff it up.
Before I started filling out beanbags, I thought that I was so prepared. I was like, “I'm intelligent. I can fill a beanbag.” I had thought it through, the right angles, how big I should cut the corner of the bag holding the beans. I actually even watched videos on it.
Yet the first time I did it, POOF. Beans everywhere. And it was because I just didn't understand how these beans were going to react.
It’s like with our avatar.
We don't understand how they're going to react.
We don't know if what we think they want is actually what they want until we put it out into the market, you know?
Is our message calling them in? Is it working? Or do we need to change it?
All this stuff, you can prepare.
And this is what I see a lot of time, especially with those OWL personalities.
They're not ready to release anything, or to do anything until they've got it all prepared and it's all perfect.
But the problem is that it's never going to be perfect until you actually get it out there and test it.
Test and tweak…
test and tweak…
test and tweak.
This is how this works.
So you just got to get your stuff out there, you've got to start creating your message, you've got to start doing videos, you've got to start putting out content and seeing what people respond to, seeing what people like, seeing what your avatar actually wants and what they think they need.
And if you are too scared to put your stuff out there, if you're trying to be a perfectionist (I mean, let's face it, that's a whole different self-sabotage thing within itself, right?), you're never going to learn what it is that you actually need to be doing.
So, you just got to get your stuff out there the first time, and then adapt and tweak from there.
3. You are never going to be perfect. But with practice, you can get good at it.
So by the time I had finished filling up the second beanbag, I was actually getting quite good.
I had worked out a funnel system. Get it? A funnel 😉
I had this funnel thing and I was pouring the beans into it, and I was catching them before I'd finished, to stop the flow.
I had learned and I had tweaked as I went along.
But I still had beans going everywhere. Maybe not as many as when I first started out, but I still had some that escaped from my funnel, from my hand.
I was never going to be perfect. I was never going to get it down to the point where I could fill up a beanbag without beans going everywhere. But I did get good at it.
And that's the thing, right?
We only need to be good.
We don't need to be perfect.
You just need to get out there and get to the point where you're good at it. And realize, as I said before, that when you first start out, you're going to suck at it, right?
You got to go through the land of suckiness to get to the point where you can actually be good at it.
4. There is a depreciating return on effort when you try to make perfect
As I got to the end, and I was trying to get more and more and more and more beans in there.
I wanted it to be full, right?
And it was taking me more and more time because I was having to be more careful. I was having to shift stuff around, shake all the beans down.
Filling the remaining 20% of the bag took me just as long as it did to fill the first 80%.
The last 10% probably took me even longer.
You can see that each percentage of the bag at the end that I was filling was taking me longer and longer and longer times.
I was getting a depreciated return on my effort.
And the truth was that when I had filled it up as much as I possibly could, and I sat on it, it actually wasn't comfortable. I had put too many beans in. I should have stopped when there was still some space in the bag.
The same with our business, right?
You can keep going, you can keep editing, you can keep going through stuff and combing stuff trying to make it perfect, and that last 20% of your editing skills is going to take you as much time as writing the first 80%.
And it's actually not going to improve it that much.
That extra time and effort that you're putting in to try and make it perfect is actually taking you away from something else that you could have gotten done in that time.
So rather than writing three emails that are 80%, you can write one email and get 99%. But let's face it, we're never going to find all the typos or the errors or the commas that are missing or things like that, right?
And think about why something needs to be perfect.
It’s what you think it means about you if it's not perfect that’s the problem here.
Is it because you're worried about what people are going to be thinking about you when they find a typo?
I still get people emailing me to this day saying, “Oh, do you edit your emails before they go out?”
And I'm like, “Well, yeah, I go through them.”
I actually end up putting them into word because I'm turning them to blog posts. And then I go through them in Word, too. But even when I'm letting the Word editor find the stuff, I'm not finding all the errors.
You know, I'm an author and I sent out an email, I'll get someone who will ask me if I realized there was a typo in my email.
And I'm like, “yeah, I'm sure there's a couple of typos in there.”
There's probably a typo in there that that person missed as well, right?
Because even when you're looking for errors, you don't find them all.
And I just make some joke about “Yep, that's why I use an editor to edit my books for me. Because I'm a writer. I'm not an editor, and I always miss stuff.”
Sorry, getting distracted here. 😉
But think about why it is that you are putting in more and more effort to get it to perfect. And you need to get to a point where you're able to make yourself stop and say this is good enough, this is good.
This is like A.
It might not be A+, it might not be A++.
Just A or even B+.
That's good enough for what I want to do right now.
It's going to work as it is, and the effort and the time it would take me to get to an A++, I could get something else done in my business.
So don’t get sucked into the depreciating return on effort within your business.
5. It is annoying as hell, but the efforts and the results are worth it.
It's the same with building a business.
When you first start out, you’ve got to build your audience.
We go out there and we know how amazing we are. We know how much we can help people. But they're not mind reader's, they don't know that.
You got to take the time to get out there and keep showing up and keep showing up with content and with social media and having your voice come over and building your email list and doing all this stuff.
It's annoying when you're not getting any return.
When you're not seeing the results, when no one's booking on your calendar yet.
But if you keep going, it will start to build, and it will start to build, and it will start to build and then the results will be worth all the hard work.
Okay, so I hope you liked my five things:
One, it's easier with more than one person.
Two, no matter how much you prepare, you're still going to stuff it up at first.
Three, you're never going to be perfect, but you can be good.
Four, there is a depreciating return on your effort if you try to make it perfect.
And five, it's annoying and difficult but well worth the effort.
If you'd like to talk to me about actually working with me, working with me as a success coach for you to overcome any obstacles or blocks that are stopping you from being able to move flow freely towards what it is you're trying to achieve in life so you can start to align the underlying belief systems that you have now with the belief systems of the person that has achieved what it is that you want to achieve, then jump on my calendar:
https://donnajoyusher.com/success-session
I will talk to you then.
